The Cardinal Newman Society, a national organization to help renew and strengthen Catholic identity in Catholic higher education, issued the following statement:

August 1, 2012, marks the formal beginning of the persecution of Catholic colleges and universities that wish to remain faithful to the teachings of the Catholic Church.

As of today, the Obama administration is forcing Catholic colleges to help students and employees obtain no-cost sterilizations, abortion-causing drugs and contraceptives, and also “counseling” promoting these practices.

And who are the first victims of the Obama administration’s new Sexual Revolution? Catholic colleges and the parents of Catholic college students!

One year ago, when the Obama administration shocked the nation with “interim final” regulations for its HHS mandate, it publicly admitted that it had rushed the rules to ensure that college students get “contraceptive services” in the 2012-2013 school year. Many student insurance plans renew in August.

In other words, the Obama administration’s desire to support students’ sexual activity without even one year’s delay is precisely why:

1) they rushed to publish a poorly constructed religious exemption, and

2) they refused to accept comments on the interim regulations until after they were issued.

Many news publications have deceptively reported that the HHS mandate is delayed another year for religious institutions, without explaining that many religious colleges and employers cannot meet the Obama administration’s arbitrary criteria for the delay.

Catholic colleges that covered “contraceptive services” as of February 10, 2012, are ineligible for the delay. But infidelity is not the only reason why Catholic colleges may be affected:

· They may have complied with state laws which violate religious freedom.

· They may have been unaware of provisions included in their health plans by insurance companies or by college personnel in prior years.

· They may operate in areas without affordable coverage that excludes contraception.

Moreover, the past infidelity of a Catholic college is no excuse for the federal government to violate that college’s First Amendment right to uphold Catholic teachings.

And further, the Obama administration is violating the rights of Catholic parents who send students to Catholic colleges, reasonably expecting their religious beliefs to be upheld. There is no religious freedom when the federal government prevents Catholic families from freely choosing authentic Catholic education.

Cardinal Donald Wuerl, archbishop of Washington, had this to say in an interview with Chris Wallace:

WUERL: This lawsuit isn’t about contraception. It is about religious freedom. Embedded in the mandate is a radically new definition of what institutes a religious community, what constitutes religious ministry — brand new and never fortified in the federal level. That’s what we are arguing about.

The lawsuit said we have every right to serve in this community as we have served for decades and decades. The new definition says you are not really religious if you serve people other than your own and if you hire people other than your own. That wipes out all of the things that we have been doing, all the things that we contribute to the common good — our schools, our health care services, our Catholic charity and even parish soup kitchens and pantries. All that’s wiped out.

WALLACE: Let me pick up on that, because the White House says — the famous accommodation by President Obama, that they changed the mandates so that the insurance companies that you are dealing with, to provide health insurance coverage to your employees have to provide the birth control for free and that the charities and the schools and the hospitals, don’t have to do anything.

WUERL: This is one of the reasons why we say the accommodation didn’t change anything, because so many of our institutions, certainly the archdiocese, is self insured. We are the insurer.

Obama is trying for force religious groups and charities out of business so he can impose his fascist socialist government to fill the vacuum of suffering he created by putting them into an impossible moral predicament: either abandon the theology that you have held for 1,500 years or abandon your charitable work and leave millions of people high and dry. But it is the theology that drives that charity work in the first place. Which makes it like yanking the floor out from under yourself and then trying to stand on thin air.

So on the one hand liberals are demonizing businesses like Chick-Fil-A and literally trying to use the raw power of government to punish them for exercising their free speech rights. And they do so on the “moral grounds” that they ought to be able to punish “anti-gay views.” And on the other hand the same damn liberals are trying to impose godawful unconstitutional restrictions that directly punish religious groups. And the fact that their views are anti-religious views, anti-Christian views and anti-biblical views doesn’t mean a damn thing in a world gone PC-crazy.